Page 1 of 9
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 496
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Post-War Document
Dinesh Kumar
Asstt. Prof. of English
Dyal Singh College,
Karnal
Dineshkarnal1@gmail.com
09466580017
Abstract
It is an established fact that T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a
powerful exploration of post-war scenario with its suffering,
disillusionment and moral vacuity. It illustrates the interplay
between emotional sufferings, portrayal of madness in pleasure,
contemporary psychiatry and offers solutions from the Indian
Upanishad. The Waste Land is a voice of the twentieth century,
heralding the destruction of life if mankind does not repent. It is
a criticism of the vile of the society and the denigration of moral
values. Even now the prophetic words of T.S. Eliot hold true for
generations. Human beings have been wayward and corruption
and death has been accepted as a normal life. He reveals
pessimism and undergoes psychiatric disturbances due to the
total dishevel of the world. He ropes in the mantel of cleansing.
He wants the society purged and free of sin, corruption and
enmity. Man needed the quiet and calm of a peaceful living.
Paper
Page 2 of 9
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 497
The Waste Land is a poetic rendering of the theme of
spiritual barrenness, moral vacuity, emotional dryness and
sexual degeneration obtained in the contemporary society under
the impact of rootless materialism, industrial advancement and
scientific temper, and because of the absence of human values
and institutional an charge, the socio-cultural edifice of the
society has crumbled down leading to meaninglessness and
aimlessness, consequently man finds himself orphaned and lost
in the quagmire of the social and spiritual chaos where the
dominating mood is of that disillusionment and disharmony.
It is such a dismal and disturbing vision of life that T.S.
Eliot elucidates through his poem, The Waste Land. Since the
central thematic vision of the poem is complex and complicated,
so it has been expressed and illustrated through an equally
complex poetic-technique comprising of the mythical framework,
the device of parallels and illusions, comparisons and contrasts,
cinematography, rich image, high symbols, the technique of
montage along with the central character and narrator, Tiresis,
who is the most persuasive and powerful force uniting, assuming,
Page 3 of 9
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 05
May 2019
Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 498
dissolving and acquiring everything he looks at, meets or
experiences.
This is what T.S. Eliot means when he says that what
Tiresis sees or observes, constitutes the substance of the poem.
The epigraph of the poem has been derived from the first century
A.D. poet, Petronius who describes the story of Sybil of Cumae,
but in the course of time, she lost her teeth, eyes, health and
vitality, and was reduced to mere a Skelton. The village children
pelted stones at her to ask what she wanted, and Sybil said that
she wanted to die, so this theme of death-in-life sets the mood of
the poem, and launches the readers directly in to the heart of the
wasteland, where its first canto, The Burial in Dead, is a close
parallel to this theme taken from the vegetarian myth of fertility
God and described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough.
Although April is the month of revival of life and rain, but
the denizens of the wasteland hate it the most for it reminds
them of life and activity of which they do not like to be reminded.
They want to use the warmth of sunlight in the hope garden,
taking coffee and talking endlessly, so the central theme of the
